I'm not sure about the inflammation side of things. I have certainly had it to relieve muscular pain around the inflammation site (muscles tense to try and minimize joint pain).Trust me, anything to avoid surgery is worth a crack.

I'm a believer in accupuncture. I was a heavy smoker (40 a day) and became a non-smoker in two weeks. That was 30 years ago and have never felt the urge to smoke since. My wife too had back pain and accupuncture fixed that.

Dry Needling is useful for the release of trigger points in muscles. Dry needling can be applied to any muscle anywhere in the body. As a health professional, I use it a lot and have a lot of success with it. It's painful at the time but it beats a 30 minute deep tissue massage when you can achieve the same result with 5 minutes of dry needling.

I also practice Acupuncture. This is useful for some people and not so good for other. Acupuncture is limited to the acupuncture points that we have around the body. Most health professionals will use it mainly for pain relief but can be used in other situations.

It's a treatment that had stood the test of time and is definitely not a placebo.

The results of aucpuncture comes down to the skills of the practitioner on choosing the right points for the patient and the duration of the treatment.

The most important part
"It is important to evaluate the literature as a whole to see what pattern emerges. The pattern that does emerge is most consistent with a null effect – that acupuncture does not work.
Controlled clinical trials of actual acupuncture (uncontrolled trials should only be considered preliminary and are never definitive) typically have three arms: a control group with no intervention or standard treatment, a sham-acupuncture group (needles are placed but in the “wrong” locations or not deep enough), and a real acupuncture group. Most of such trials, for any intervention including pain, nausea, addiction, and others, show no difference between the sham-acupuncture group and the true acupuncture group. They typically do show improved outcome in both acupuncture groups over the no-intervention group, but this is typical of all clinical trials and is clearly due to placebo-type effects. Such comparisons should be considered unblinded because patients knew whether they were getting acupuncture (sham or real).
The lack of any advantage of real- over sham-acupuncture means that it does not matter where the needles are placed. This is completely consistent with the hypothesis that any perceived benefits from acupuncture are non-specific effects from the process of getting the treatment, and not due to any alleged specific effects of acupuncture. In other words, there is no evidence that acupuncture is manipulating chi or anything else, that the meridians have any basis in reality, or that the specific process of acupuncture makes any difference.
More recent trials have attempted to improve the blinded control of such trials by using acupuncture needles that are contained in an opaque sheath. The acupuncturist depresses a plunger, and neither they nor the patient knows if the needle is actually inserted. The pressure from the sheath itself would conceal any sensation from the needle going in. So far, such studies show no difference between those who received needle insertion and those who did not – supporting the conclusion that acupuncture has no detectable specific health effect.
Taken as a whole, the pattern of the acupuncture literature follows one with which scientists are very familiar: the more tightly controlled the study the smaller the effect, and the best-controlled trials are negative. This pattern is highly predictive of a null-effect – that there is no actual effect from acupuncture."

My favourite joke on this by Tim Minchin:

Q: What do you call "Alternative Medicine" that has been proven to work in properly controlled scientific studies? A: Medicine

The Sci-ence webcomic series Ghosts of Woo, especially part two, generally explains my opinion of Acupuncture and pseudo-science in general. It does get a bit "preachy" but it is a good representation of a more scientific opinion of acupuncture. The additional comment below the comics add more explanation and narration beyond the comics themselves.

IMHO osteopathy isn't just a placebo. They work with muscles and bones, stretching muscles, putting things back in place. My wife has some semi-serious condition with her back, since she's been seeing a good Osteo she's much better. He said he didn't know if he could help, but he did. He's done great things for me as well, on the odd occasion I hurt myself he fixes me up. I've tried waiting and seeing if it'll fix itself, I've tried going in immediately when I hurt myself, the recovery time is much shorter when I see my osteo.

Chiro's though, in, crack, out, they've never done a bit of good for me.